Phi Phenomenon
by melissaisdown
Summary: Summary: Mulder and Scully are in a sexual relationship. A video camera is involved. Sprinkles of substance on top of a confection of smut. (aka) Mulder and Scully make a porno.


Title: Phi Phenomenon

Spoilers: Uh, everything I guess.

Timeline: Any time after The Truth

Summary: Mulder and Scully are in a sexual relationship. A video camera is involved. Sprinkles of substance on top of a confection of smut. (aka) Mulder and Scully make a porno.

*The title refers to the phenomenon (in combination with persistence of vision) which allows us to see a succession of static images as a single unbroken movement, permitting the continuous motion upon which cinematography is based.

A/N: Feedback is much appreciated! Thanks for reading.

**phi phenomenon**

The psychology of voyeur and exhibitionist is simple. Mulder was trying to explain it to her that night. They were undercover in that gated community, posing as an upstanding suburban-perfect husband and wife. They were FBI agents, not actors. Mulder with his Oxford education couldn't help but joke about Scully and her video camera and the roles they were playing.

"You want to make that honeymoon video now?" He quipped. Later that night he tried the same kind of joke, expecting Scully would ignore it again.

"Time to break in the bed. Leave the camera on."

Instead, she slid the camera off of her hand, laying it on the night stand. She stood, cross-armed and thinking a moment.

"I said leave the camera on," he said to break the silence.

"What makes you think I haven't?"

"I just watched you turn it off and twist the lens cap––"

"No. I mean ever."

Mulder sat up, his heart hiccuping at the thought.

"Scully," was all his stunned mind could get his tongue to articulate. "Really?"

She nodded, the warm amaranth of her lips curving up into a grin. She sat on the edge of the bed. Mulder knew seduction was impossible. He forced his arousal to transmute into conversation and talked to her all night about the paraphilias of the voyeur and the exhibitionist, audience and performer. He talked out of context quoting both Psychology Today and his Adult News magazines.

Scully knew he'd never, but obviously wanted to. Too much was revealed in the crackling timbre of his voice, his pupils dilated in the lamplight. The idea was contagious. She had infected him with this incurable thought: Scully naked on the crest of orgasm, whimpering or gasping and all recorded. He could pause or rewind and worship every frame.

Recurring outbreaks play behind his closed eyes still.

He spent a long time scouring her apartment for some unmarked or mislabeled tape. He would lie about what he was looking for or look when she was in the shower or hospital or their basement office.

There was a time when he didn't know if he'd ever have her and so something tangibly erotic, something visual, something that depicted what he'd always thought about but had never experienced with her would have done more than suffice.

No video was ever recovered though. If it did exist, it was under lock and key in some unsuspecting place, a silo, a safe deposit box. He hoped it was hidden in an old bomb shelter and might survive the end of the world.

That was the tease. That was years ago. Now they have more behind them than could fit on any timeline. They're older with less to lose only because they've lost so much. They're living together and content to dawdle, to not push the issue or call what they have a commitment. They belong to each other. Stakes have been claimed, still, it's more than possession. It's fate and irony and they both remember every minute of the long drive, the hurdles and defeats, the bullets dodged and the bullets that went clean through.

They are standing in their kitchen one morning. It's summer where they are and honeysuckle wafts through the screen of their back door. They are happy to be alive most days, and with each other. Despite all of their gratitude for the fresh air and freedom, they are becoming complacent. They are not used to the mundanity that has become their normal. They cannot assimilate to this life. They have passed the finish line but want to keep running.

They run like this:

Standing in the kitchen, pouring black coffee onto their empty stomachs. Mulder studies the lipstick stain on her mug. He moves behind her. Scully in her bare feet, her hair longer, catches his movement in her periphery. That's the agreement they have, to follow where the other leads, to trust more completely than reason should allow. Mulder presses his lips to her neck. She feels the warmth of his breath, like reluctancy, a humid second guess. His hand skims up her back.

"Don't go in today."

"Mulder, I have to. It's Monday, there's––"

He stops her mid-sentence. She's not put the lab coat on yet and he's caught the zipper of her dress, this navy blue, form-fitting, thin-as-parchment paper dress. And why did she never wear dresses at the FBI? It was always suits and long skirts and shoulder pads. In this dress she's home. She's his.

He has to get her out of it.

The unzipping is slow, like a threat. To be wanted as much as Mulder wants her is persuasion enough and Scully turns around and kisses him, half-wake and a little frustrated she kisses him, keeps kissing him as they move to the couch, their dim living room. His hand wends its way into the dress, his palm against her bare back as he unclasps her bra. With a shrug the dress falls to the floor. He sits and she straddles his lap and they perpetuate the oblivion like a waking dream, like something that's only real when they're together.

After, when she picks up her dress, tries to pat the wrinkles out of it and slips it back on, Mulder decides to ask.

"There never was a tape, was there?"

"What?"

"Years ago. You intimated that you had once videotaped it. This."

"Oh."

She slides on one shoe.

"Was there? Is there?"

Silence. She bends to push on the second shoe.

"Scully?"

"There was," she tells him, looking down. "A long time ago."

"Do you still have it?"

"Maybe. Does it really matter?"

"_Yes_. Where is it?"

"I don't know," she lies. She gives him a peck on the cheek, folds her lab coat over her forearm and leaves for work, an hour late and smiling.

While she is gone, Mulder digs through their spare room's closet. He finds a video camera they haven't used in years and a tripod and a tangle of wires and cords. He wonders why he never thought of this before. He wonders if he should go buy a new camera and if Scully will say yes.

"You're serious?" Scully asks, after dinner.

Mulder nods. He's squinting, holding his breath, hoping she understands. There is the sexual layer of his request. Yes, he wants to know what he looks like when he fucks Scully, what she looks like with him, their sounds, their movements the whole memorized choreography from a different perspective.

It could be more than that too. Doing this might fix into place all of these transient moments, document this affair that sometimes still doesn't feel real. It would inject permanence into both their lives, lives which have been condemned to uncover truths nobody should know, to live in secret and never stand still. All at once this seemed to Mulder an answer to the question he never thought to ask.

Scully is stammering. She will not say no. The idea is not all that daunting. She has done this before and come out the other side unscathed. She trusts Mulder will not broadcast it. He's never betrayed her that way.

"Why?" She asks, curious.

"I like to watch. The idea of watching you, or us together. It's always turned me on."

He swallows. Scully looks at him, faint incredulity crossing her face. Her need for a logical reason has always exhausted him.

"I guess I just realized how easy it would be to do this, if you want. To do this," he adds.

Mulder's imagination made into a high resolution reality. Scully likes that idea. She likes how nervous he is at this moment, how she will always rise to the role of accomplice in any crime he asks her to commit.

"Okay," she whispers, her nail drawing spirals on the back of his hand.

She gets up from the dinner table and he watches her in astounded relief.

The progression is incremental. His hope is a slow build. Like a continental drift, a gradual rearrangement of emotions and desires.

Mulder does buy a new camera. He leafs through the manual and adjusts the velcro of the handstrap until it fits him comfortably. His hand is trembling a little when they begin. The objective tonight is to let the want mount, until it reaches that unbearable intensity, like before they'd ever touched each other, when it was all speculative and internalized and unrequited.

He kisses her to start and she looks up at him. Her eyes say I can't believe I'm doing this but her mouth is hot. His willpower is consumed in the single act of pulling away from her.

The house is quiet. The sound of evening traffic seeps through the half-open windows. There is also the thunder of their heartbeats, the almost inaudible electronic ambience of the camera now that he has pressed record.

"Tell me," Mulder says, walking backwards, zooming out and focusing.

"Tell me what you think about when you do this."

Scully's eyes are shut tight. Arousal has punctured her exterior but an awkward stage fright is tightening in her stomach.

"I think about you," she admits.

"What about me?"

"Your voice," she answers, because her eyes are still closed and she's suddenly aware of its nasally nuance, of the comfort she's always felt when she hears his voice. It's always been aural asylum, some signal that they had survived.

Mulder strokes the top of her right foot, wanting her to look at him. When her eyes open, she sees him with the camera. His hair's in his eyes. He is in a t-shirt and boxerbriefs, half-hard, his erection a lonely parenthesis jutting against the cotton. He is standing in front of the mirror so that she sees him and she sees herself too, from the midriff up. Mulder watching her watch herself and the reflection of it makes for a strange taunt.

"What else?" he asks.

It's surreal how vulnerable and exposed she feels. It's intoxicating in a way she didn't expect. She bites her bottom lip, staring into the mirror. She sees the flush spread across her chest. Her nipples are darker than she remembers. From bearing his child, she thinks.

Her knees are bent, legs spread conservatively but enough. She lets her fingertips brush the dampness between her thighs and is glad she can't see that, just feel it.

"The way you touch me."

Her eyes roll shut and she flinches as she begins to tease her middle finger around the outside of her barely hooded clit. She has to start gentle and slow and stoke the fire that's kindling inside her.

Her thumb strokes through the valley of her inner labia. Her thighs tense. A fantasy starts to unspool behind her eyelids. Or maybe it's a memory. A finger pushes into her and then another. Scully moans at the ingress.

"Talk to me," Mulder goads.

Her head lolls back and she winces, looking at him. She is lost and remembering and hardly even here.

"The way you taste."

She thrusts, impatient. Years of hypercelibacy and a tacit betrothal to this man meant too many lonely nights, too much time spent like this: her own white knuckles curling inside of her, straining, yearning to be with him.

Now here she is, blushing, out of breath and doing this for him. Doing this _with_ him. She knows her own anatomy too well and finds that spot on her inner wall and strokes it, all maddening repetition in just the right pace.

"I think of how long I waited."

"Waited for what?"

"For you."

The words make Mulder want to drop the camera, climb onto the bed, drape her legs over his shoulders and push into her for the eternity they deserve. Fuck her into dehydration, or early retirement.

She's watching his reaction to her words, the lust they invoke, his impossible self-restraint.

She wants to reach for him but pushes harder, inching deeper and imagining the pressure of him inside her, testing her limits, making her tremble.

"You remember that night?" He asks. It's not really a question. It's a trigger. Their first time.

"God, yes," she drawls. It's the memory she's been feeding on. That night is where she will always go if she can't be with him.

Her fingers are beginning to ache. Scully has brought herself to the edge already. She wants to stay there. She wants Mulder to take her over it.

Mulder is there too, so that it hurts to stand so close to her, to see the beads of sweat glint to life on her chest, creep and fall between her breasts. To smell the faded scent of her perfume, the way it's eclipsed by the perfume of her sex.

"Mulder, I'm––god, please. _Mulder_," she cries.

It's getting harder to watch. His cock is throbbing painfully. It feels bruised. It feels trapped. His eyes focus on the viewfinder.

He sees movement in the crimson shadow between her legs; slick noises and soft whimpers underscore the scene. Her hips rise. Her breath catches. Her hand stills. A stifled moan and a long sigh and it all seems to be happening in slow motion. She's there and he's rapt, lightheaded, capturing it with an unsteady hand. He sees the pleasure cut through her, sharp-edged and fleeting and they're both helpless in that moment, bystander and casualty suspended in the experience.

When the tremors subside, she stares at him. Mulder is brooding at the bottom of the bed. Her vision blurred, synapses still firing, Scully takes a deep breath.

"Was that good?" She asks through a wry grin.

"Very."

She sits up, feeling that sudden awareness of her nakedness that she always feels after sex. The red light on the camera has stopped blinking.

Scully moves to the foot of the bed. She stands slowly, her legs weak with orgasm-aftermath pins and needles. Her arms reach behind his back and she kisses him and just the press of her body against his threatens his composure. He moans in warning and tries to hand her the camera.

"No," she says sitting back down.

She cranes her neck to kiss the grooves of his lower ribs. She exhales against his abdomen, planting sloppy kisses along an agonizingly eventual trail. Her fingers pull at the elastic of his waistband and finally, finally free his cock from its cotton confines.

She studies it for a moment. The color, the veins and incongruities and pulse in it. Pearls of pre-cum have teared at the tip. The droplets are their own aesthetic. They roll onto her hand when she touches him.

A few deliberate strokes and she takes him in her mouth. Mulder lets out a jagged whisper of a breath. It ends in a quiet whine. One hand combs through her damp red hair. The other presses record.

The whole world narrows, idles and stops in the furnace of her mouth.

There is this pattern that only Scully's tongue has ever found. Half-circles, whole length, throat open, lips tight.

Mulder throws his head back and stares at the ceiling. The sight of his cock disappearing into her mouth, that mouth that for how many years justified too many counterpoints, demanded scientific explanations, always insisted she was fine, that mouth that it took seven years to even kiss, that mouth is engulfing him with a fervor, a need that he can only match by thrusting forward and it's too much.

She feels it when the muscles in his stomach tense. He inhales and holds it. His jaw clenches and he looks down at her. Her hands move from his hips to the backs of his thighs. She reels him in closer and he pivots with a groan and it all dissolves into the splatter of sweet heat against the back of her throat and Scully swallowing and Mulder breathing and both of them collapsing into the slow descent back down to earth.

They continue on like this for weeks.

He films and doesn't touch her.

He films her when she doesn't know he is too, soaking in the tub at night or dressing in the morning. He films her sleeping. It doesn't have to be sexual. It's becoming a kind of documentary. It's their love made visible at thirty frames per second.

Scully picks up the camera when she can. She gets him eating breakfast, sweeping the litter of sunflower seed shells from his desk to his office floor and brushing his teeth while reading. For most of the first week she tries to get him masturbating.

She finds him in the shower on day six.

He is mid-stroke, wet hair matted to his face, steam fogging the lens. He ignores the camera completely and concentrates on Scully, the way she's looking at him. His fist starts to move faster.

Scully's nipples sting as they stiffen against her shirt. She fights not to break eye contact with him, but his gaze is starving her of oxygen. Little twitches tug at the muscles of his jaw. The sinews on his throat stand out against his skin. The muscles in his forearm flex; a smiles bends at the edge of his mouth and his eyes close. The signs of his impending orgasm, and her stuck standing here a spectator when she wants him inside her more than she wants her next breath, make her acutely aware that she is wearing too many clothes.

She wants to undress, climb into the shower with him, her palms pressed against the tiles, Mulder bucking until it hurts, until he's spent himself inside her and it's agony to disconnect.

A guttural sob, drowned in the sound of the water and Mulder comes, fierce and final. Scully is watching him, not the camera so it's framed canted and then not at all when he grabs her arm and pulls her into him. He kisses her like they're newlyweds, or this is a homecoming and it's all they can do.

His lust smears against the pleat of her jacket. The water has drenched her hair and washed away her makeup and instead of leading him out of the shower, she lets him pull her all the way in. They kiss like that, believer and skeptic, naked and clothed, voyeur and exhibitionist until the water runs cold.

The day arrives unexpected.

It is the day Scully can't take this anymore. Mulder inside of her, at night, after work has become a kind of sustenance. She is starving, empty, weak without it.

But mostly, she is flustered.

When she thinks about it, them alone together watching themselves, tangled in the most corporeal embrace: the sheets, the skin, the sounds––she has to remind herself to keep breathing.

She gets home around nine. There is nothing else on her mind. She pours herself two large glasses of wine. The second is half empty when Mulder walks in. He sees it in her eyes, gray-blue with flecks of bronze. He sees that she's acquiesced to the idea. She's come to the same conclusion as him. She wants this.

He reaches for her hand and pulls her to him, like a dance partner, like they're just picking up where they left off in some unrehearsed lambada. He kisses her palm, the bend of her arm below the bicep and at last her open mouth.

"Tonight," she says, the burgundy staining her lips. Mulder follows her upstairs.

What happens next is a kind of carnal car crash. It's all inertia. An inability to brake.

It's the final result of a series of events set into motion the day he turned the ignition and asked her.

They cross the median when they open the door.

They step into the dim haze of their bedroom. It is filled with moonlight filtered through thin curtains and the solace of knowing this is their space. Mulder undresses her the way he always does: with precision and solicitous fixation, like he's uncovering the last sacred truth left in the world.

There is only urgency in Scully's touch. Her fingers unzipping him then frantic in the belt loop of his jeans, pulling them down and sweeping under his shirt. Buttons torpedo to dark corners, lost forever. She bites his lip in a hard insistent kiss and he thinks he likes Scully the most like this, when she's more of a verb than a noun.

The tripod stands in the middle of the room like a third person. The camera is already mounted on it. The hall light is on and the door open, for light. He pulls away from her just long enough to press record.

He returns to her, Scully on the edge of the bed waiting. She's extending an arm and he moves on top of her. There is romance in the movement, the sway and revel. The skin is cool on her shoulders and arms and clavicle. He purses his lips into her suprasternal notch, kisses her chin and shifts.

Mulder deposits his face between her legs. He kisses from the side of her knee to the crease of her thigh. He breathes in the smell of her arousal and lingers until she squirms for contact.

He buries his mouth then, tongue laving, nose pressed firm above her clit. Intermittent slurping and sucking swirl into a suffocating maelstrom and he hums because he knows her body, its secrets and strengths, trip wires and land mines and as good as this feels, all the caged energy about to uncoil, she doesn't want it to, not yet, not like this.

"Mulder," she pleads, gripping his hand before his fingers can slip in and defuse her.

He starts his journey toward her voice. There's a detour where he concentrates on her breasts for minutes. She can't deny him that. It's a kind of torture, the light feather-like touch coupled with the wet wildfire of his mouth.

She can feel him, hard and seeping at a strange angle near the bend of her knee. A serrated lovesickness stabs at her.

Scully strokes behind one of his ears and he looks up and rises, settling with glossed lips beside her. She climbs onto him and Mulder, with open arms, murmurs something about there always being room on his lap for her.

The weight of her on top of him seems to transcend gravity. There is friction, like the cells of their skin trying to fuse. She grinds against him, commingling their clear but abundant lust. Her hips cant, pushing out the bones to make a well of her lower stomach. She begins to move, tentatively, like maybe it hurts. Or maybe it feels so fucking good she can only react in a languid flux.

The sharp tendons of her thighs stand out from the bandage-white skin. Scully has strong legs. They quiver with the tension of her spread. Between them, she is bare and splayed: her inner lips a blood-red rose. Mulder's hands are behind her, steadying her, cradling the smooth taut skin of her ass. They dip into the indents of her vertebrae, Scully's backbone like a player piano.

She sinks, finally and slowly and bravely and he lets her. He doesn't thrust up, not yet; he lets her glean what she needs. He watches himself looped, disappearing into her body over and over again. He likes to cede control, just watch her lithe frame above him and hold her close.

Inside her he's a dull pulse. He breaks her and reshapes her and complicates her. She is where he belongs, snared in an unhurried rise and fall, clench and release. She is his haven, his last hope. She always has been.

When she bares her neck to him he takes it. His lips move from her jugular to the hollow of throat, her temple and mouth.

The motion of her hips quickens with that connection and he can't help arching into her, almost involuntary, like a drowning man struggling toward the surface for air. He feels the muscles of her walls flutter around him. He grips her tighter, possessive urgency in his fingers as they curl into her flesh.

The bright spark of pleasure that presages her orgasm rises like mercury from the base of Scully's spine. She clings to his body, his chest rasping against her breasts, a day's worth of beard grating the bone of her cheek.

Mulder pushes up with desperate, uneven thrusts, instinctively pulling her hips down as he bucks. She seesaws and swivels, riding him like it's the last thing she'll ever do. She stops suddenly when he's unbearably buried, pressed precise against some invisible trigger inside her. The stutters of her breath catch in her throat. The contractions come in waves. The pitch of uncontrol is contagious, unstoppable as imminent collision.

They resist the reflex to brace themselves against the brutal glory of impact. They let go into it. He feels the heat of what he's held in for weeks flood into her. Scully is still coming and he moves in the endless exquisite squeeze until it subsides and her lips are dragging across his sweat-wet face, finding his mouth and breathing at last.

They are collapsed together, panting, the world static, fading in and out like a quasar. He is holding her tight, protectively. She is breathing in the smell of his aftershave, the smell of their sex, face down against the slope of his neck.

Mulder twists to kiss her. It lands off-center but endearing. This is their love: half wreckage, half reward. Scully's knee bends, adjusting. He squeezes her thigh. His fingers trace the silhouette of her body. She is a crux, a knot of emotion in a quarantine of reason.

He is inside of her, solid and still. They could fall asleep like this, heart rates slowing, the whole scene turning flaccid and placid and cool. Tonight they don't though. A strange intensity hangs from a ledge. The camera is still rolling. So are his hips.

Scully leans backward, onto her hands, her back bowing into a taut curve, a pornographic stretch. This is how she invites his tentative thrusts to escalate. Soon he's lifting off the bed and she's bracing herself for each successive blow, the grind of her squat more weakness than intent. There is just the upward drive of his body, the stinging impalement of it, this unexpected repeat. The sweet twinge is a carving knife dipped in caramel and already she is close again. The undercurrent of her orgasm spreads, rising. There is the languorous build-up, the inevitable overflow until it breaks through her, a demolishing throe. Mulder's jaw is ground shut and his fingers are threaded through hers, sweaty palm to sweaty palm as he follows her blindly with a strangled groan.

The viscous silk of their orgasms spills out of her and onto him, after. It saturates the sheets and taints the night. Scully falls back, at a slant, like a door unhinged. She lies there, sated and shell-shocked and smiling.

An early summer storm is born in the distance. Thunder rumbles. Fragments of the world feel pieced together. After a while, her voice quavering with emotion, she sits up and asks: "What was that?"

"Hmm?" Mulder questions, so close to sleep. He turns his head to face her, opens his eyes.

"Haven't I ever told you I have no refractory period?"

Scully laughs. It is the bubbly laugh she's always had at the shock of his absurdities, the ones that always prove to be truths.

"You're not serious?"

"I am," Mulder nods. "I mean I have one, but it's unnaturally short."

"How short?"

"Two, maybe three minutes. Sometimes less."

"Why am I just finding out about this now?"

Mulder gives a contemplative shrug, looks down.

"I thought I'd lost it. For a while it was gone. I figured I had worn it out or grown an immunity, adapted away from it with age."

"But?"

"But the last few weeks, it's back again."

A bolt of lightening shoots through Scully. It starts in her heart, ricochets off her hips and settles at the soles of her feet. The idea of Mulder being able to fuck her to sleep, through an uninterrupted series of synchronous eruptions whets a whole new fantasy. Hers.

She leans into him and places a firm, punctuating kiss to his open mouth. The punctuation of choice? An ellipsis.

He is looking at the camera, the camera capturing this post, post-coital vignette. All the affection and want and understanding. They will fall asleep soon. In the morning he will hold the tape. He knows he will stow it away, watch it for days when Scully's at a conference or lecture or overseas consult. He will masturbate to the thought of making another, to the images of her and him together.

In the morning, he will slip into his boxerbriefs and stretch. He will count the tiny bruises, red blotches, scratches and lipstick stains on his body. He will watch her sleep, residual longing still behind her closed eyes.

He'll be on the edge of the bed when she wakes. The camera will be stored away, the tape on their dresser. She'll see it, ask sleepily, "What do you want to do with it?"

Maybe, Mulder thinks, they _can_ stop running. Maybe they can sit down and just, just.

"Watch it."


End file.
